We’ll by no means know who spoke the primary sentence or what they stated, however we are able to have some enjoyable speculating. Maybe it got here out of the mouth of a Stone Age man who hoped to defeat a rival and win the affections of a younger girl. He may need sidled as much as his love curiosity and, whereas furtively pointing at his competitor, whispered gently in her ear one thing that interprets into English as “shit-head”.
Ridiculous? Not if you’re guided by the analysis of linguist Ljiljana Progovac. She factors out that though Charles Darwin described language as “half art, half instinct”, most individuals who research its evolution have uncared for the inventive aspect. Her analysis begins to redress that by homing in on the wordplay concerned in compound phrases similar to shit-head, skin-flint and lily-livered, a lot of that are written as single phrases at the moment. These, she believes, are linguistic fossils that trace at an important stage in language evolution: the second when people realised that they might string two phrases collectively to create very quick sentences.
What’s extra, after gathering examples of such phrases, Progovac seen they’ve one thing shocking in widespread. “They are usually derogatory,” she says. And there could possibly be a great evolutionary purpose for that too.
Language is central to the human expertise, however finding out its historical roots is troublesome as a result of it leaves no archaeological traces – not less than till the invention of writing. However, judging by communication programs in different animals, we are able to assume that our ancestors began by making easy noises or…
